medieval

Omission as the purposeful withholding of a component from a text or other work of art, is an aesthetic practice looking back on a long history. From the simple statement to the effect that a particular idea cannot be adequately expressed, via the deliberate practice of choosing which scenes not to represent on stage, to the sudden collapse of a text into an unexpected silence, omission can be a powerful aesthetic strategy. Be it through deliberate incompletion, through the absence of language or characters, or through a dearth of contextual information leaving an abundance of interpretive gaps, such instances of omission are based on three main ideas:

The global medieval and early modern world (broadly considered, c. 900-1750) underwent myriad profound changes, from devastating famines, plagues, and wars to an increased entanglement of the continents, economic transformations, and technological and scientific developments. These changes were often accompanied by calls for the reshaping of the institutions and structures – political, religious, intellectual, etc. – which undergirded societies’ approach to these challenges, encompassing such responses as resistance, resilience, and renewal. 

The discipline of Comparative Literature has already been through its “age of multiculturalism” (1995) and its “age of globalization” (2006), in the effort to displace European/Eurocentric hierarchies of value with more nuanced goals for literary study. As Comparative Literature has diversified, however, medieval studies has often been aligned with the old Eurocentrisms. What can medieval studies contribute to the next phase of the discipline, the “age of anti-racism”?Please send 250 word abstracts to Michelle Warren (michelle.r.warren@dartmouth.edu) by March 15th.

The recent “affective turn” derives from a Spinozist interpretation and complication of the dualist mind-body binary. The mind’s power to think is intimately entangled with and correlated to the body’s power to act. Affect refers to the body’s capacity to affect and be affected, to its sensitivity and connection to other bodies. Recent interpretations of affect link it to everyday modes of production, circulation, and consumption as well. For example, for Sara Ahmed affects, just like emotions, “stick” as they circulate between bodies and thus produce subjectivities that disrupt or reconfigure a status quo.

Coined by Cedric J. Robinson in his magnum opus Black Marxism (1983), the term “racial capitalism” refers to the simultaneous and interdependent rise of global capitalism and racial classification and stratification. Robinson’s principal goal is to identify a tradition of radical thought and practice among Black intellectuals and activists in sites of colonial exploitation. He therefore decenters Marxist history by shifting our attention away from metropolitan Europe as a site of political radicalization. Black Marxism begins, however, in the European Middle Ages, which in Robinson’s view gave rise both to modern myths of whiteness and to the racialization of the proletariat.

The Department of European Literature at the University of the Republic (Uruguay) announces its 11th International Montevideana Conference, to be held virtually.

It is tempting to think of Boccaccio's most important work in relation to our current times, given that in recent months the Decameron has become a virtual meeting place through rewrites, seminars, and group readings dedicated to the text. The superposition of his pandemic with ours has become, in more than one sense, a paradoxical kind of locus amoenus, adding a new layer to the varied investigations and artistic appropriations that this Italian text has motivated in its 700 years of existence.

MEDIEVAL TEXTS ACROSS DISTANCES
ENGLISH I (MEDIEVAL)

SAMLA Conference: November 4-6, 2021 in Atlanta, Georgia

https://samla.memberclicks.net/callsforpapers#englishstudies

Call for Papers

New Chaucer Studies:  Pedagogy and Profession

The Medieval Studies Program at Cornell University is pleased to announce its thirty-first annual graduate student colloquium (MSSC). The conference will take place on the 26th and the 27th of March, to be held virtually over Zoom.

This year’s colloquium focuses on the theme of movement. Movement denotes the movement of peoples, cultures, thoughts and goods, the migration of plants and of animals. What happens to movement when it is frozen in stone (the swoop of hair across a person’s face in a marble statue)? How does an idea change when it is translated from one language to another? We are interested in movement defined broadly and represented across a range of disciplines.

Oxford Research in English

Call for Papers – Spring 2021 issue

'TRASH'

Deadline: November 30th, 2020

Religion and the Arts, a peer-reviewed journal edited at Boston College and published by Brill of the Netherlands, is looking for writers with professional experience and an advanced degree to write individual book reviews and combined review-essays in the fields of religion and literature, poetry, music, dance, architecture, film, and art history. Our reviewers are academics, independent scholars, writers, poets, artists, teachers, and clergy. 

Please send a short bio and vita to relarts@bc.edu describing your education, publications, and current interests: as well as any recent books (2019 forward) you might like to review. 

CFP for the monographic issue Reception of the Romanica Silesiana journal

Renaissance Conference of Southern California

65th Annual Conference

Saturday, 20 March 2021

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for our first virtual or webinar 65th RCSC Annual Conference.

We are honored that our roundtable participants, scheduled originally for last year, have agreed to share their ideas about Interdisciplinary Research and its complexities at RCSC 2021.

PLENARY ROUNDTABLE

Interdisciplinary Research and the Renaissance

The 2020 pandemic has required everyone to think about the boundaries of self and body in new ways, but these questions were already at the center of medieval devotional texts from the Ancrene Wisse to the Shewings of Julian of Norwich, and even The Book of Margery Kempe, in which Margery seeks harbor wherever she goes. 

This session asks for presentations related to enclosure and isolation in medieval art, history and literature, especially works that influence prose writings in the vernacular. 

What did cloistered living offer to nuns and anchoresses, and what did the cloister offer to the outside world?